Two conflicting conceptions
of feminine dignity;
feminism as male-role-envy

By F. ROGER DEVLIN

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1.

One of the hallmarks of Western civilization is the unusually high status it has accorded
women. That has often been attributed to the influence of Christianity, which prizes
certain typically feminine virtues (mercy, humility) more than pagan society had. But
Tacitus had already noted the respect paid to women's opinions as being typical of the
pagan Germanic tribes of his time. Some believe the regard paid to women to be a
reflection of conditions in ancient Northern Europe, where the nuclear rather than the
extended family was the more important economic unit. But however it may have
originated, women's position in our civilization has recently been eroded by economic
developments and by the feminist movement. The present essay aims to explain how this
has happened and argue the need to reverse the process.

Much confusion exists regarding the feminist attack upon women's status, because the
feminist movement has always presented itself to outsiders  usually with success
 as an effort to improve that status. Feminists, as we all know, assert that women
are rightfully the "equals" of men and deserve a "level playing field" on which to compete
with them. In our time, it is a rare person whose notions about women's claims remain
wholly uninfluenced by these slogans; that is true even of many who think of themselves
as opponents of feminism. For example, certain would-be defenders of Western
civilization believe Islam presents a danger to us principally because it does not accept
"equality of the sexes." Indeed, they sometimes make it sound as though they would have
no objection to Islam if only Muslim girls were free to wear miniskirts, join the Army, and
divorce their husbands. Or again, many in the growing father's movement describe their
goal as implementing "true" equality rather than recovering their traditional role as family heads. I have
even known conservatives to earnestly assure young audiences that the idea of sexual
equality comes to us from Christianity  a crueler slander upon the Faith than
Voltaire or Nietzsche ever imagined. The extreme case of such confusion can be found in
"mainstream" conservatives such as William Kristol, who claims to oppose feminism on
the grounds that its more exotic manifestations "threaten women's recent gains": in other
words, the problem with feminism is that it endangers feminism. It is difficult to combat a
movement whose fundamental premises one accepts.

In fact, the high standing of women in our civilization not only long predates feminist
ideology but is logically incompatible with it. To understand why, one needs to keep two points in mind: 1) women's traditional status was linked to behavioral expectations 
fulfilling the duties of their station; and 2) it assumed qualitative differences and
complementarity (rather than "fair" competition) between the sexes.

As to the first point: strictly speaking, it was never women as such who enjoyed
high status but rather the social roles proper to them  those of wife and mother,
chiefly. Being born female (or male) is merely a natural fact of no intrinsic moral
significance, but the filling of a social role involves effort and often sacrifice. Accordingly,
the respect paid to women was not an unconditional birthright; it was reserved for women
who fulfilled their feminine obligations.

Among those obligations, marital fidelity was of supreme importance: so much so that in
our language general terms such as virtue and morality have often been used to refer
specifically to sexual fidelity in women. That is owing not to irrational prudery, as the
apostles of sexual liberation imagined, but to the recognition that all which is necessary to
destroy a race and civilization is for its women to refuse to be faithful wives and
mothers.

The Western tradition also includes a strong presumption that women wish to
fulfill their role; in other words, women are assumed to be "virtuous" until proven
otherwise. In certain eras it was dangerous even to suggest that a lady might not be a
paragon of sexual self-restraint if one did not have very strong proofs: an aspersion upon a
woman's honor was grounds for a duel. Of course, that does not make much sense when
women have no honor; and today, the proponents of equality and liberation openly
repudiate the very idea as an "oppressive social construct." But to be frank, I suspect honor
never was actually the primary determinant of women's behavior. Good example
(especially from their mothers), habit, lack of opportunity, religious instruction, and, in the
last instance, the prospect of social disgrace and financial ruin were probably always more
effective with them.

Men, however, have often been encouraged to believe that women are naturally
monogamous, unmotivated by anything so base as sexual attraction, and only seek "good
husbands" whom they disinterestedly marry out of love. This pleasing and edifying view
of womanhood is the basis of the West's cultural forms surrounding relations between the
sexes: gallantry, chivalry, courtship, and companionate marriage. These are what place
love, in Edmund Burke's phrase, "if not among the virtues, among the ornaments of
life."

There are also certain more practical, if less delicate, considerations involved: viz., if a
husband trusts his wife, he can skip rushing home from the office unannounced to make
sure she is not in bed with the gardener. That leaves him free to devote his full attention
to his own role as breadwinner for children he is sure are his own.

The socially beneficial effects of the chivalrous view of womanhood are quite independent
of its accuracy. There is not necessarily any pre-established harmony between what is true
and what it is useful for men to believe. A man may be better off not knowing the whole
truth about women  even, or perhaps especially, his wife. But most women
cooperated enthusiastically in promoting the chivalrous view, even if they were not taken
in by it themselves. That is partly because they have been shrewd enough to perceive the
advantages of maintaining a high reputation with men and partly because they are
naturally more reticent than men about their sexual urges ("modest").

But whether based upon knowledge or pleasing illusion, the regard in which our civilization has held women depends utterly upon their practice of monogamy, and makes
no sense apart from it. As long as cases of female adultery were few enough, they could be
passed off to men as freaks of nature, akin to two-headed babies. When, on the other hand,
wives in their millions act upon the feminist plan of "liberation," walk out on their
husbands, separate them from their children, bankrupt them in divorce court, and shack
up with other men, that system breaks down. That is where we are today.

To my mind, the most remarkable feature of the revolution we have undergone is the
time lag between the changes in women's behavior and changes in men's attitude toward
them. Men often strain to blame their own sex for what has gone wrong, though the natural disadvantage of the male's position makes his primary responsibility unlikely on a priori
grounds: since women have greater control over the mating process, they are inherently
likelier than men to be at the root of any fundamental breakdown in family formation and
stability.

It seems that many men have an emotional need to believe in the inherent virtue or
innocence of women, a bit of sentimentality akin to the Romantics' cult of childhood.
Even today, under a burgeoning feminist police-state, male commentators not
infrequently berate their own sex for an allegedly insufficient appreciation of the lofty
claims of womanhood. The kindest thing one might say of such men is that they are
condemning themselves to irrelevance. A somewhat less kind judgment might be that
they are collaborators.

The chivalrous view of women is helpful for keeping in check the naturally wayward
desires of young husbands in a substantially monogamous society; it is useless or
positively harmful in a society being run by spoiled and tyrannical females who have
"liberated" themselves from domestic obligations. As usual, conservatives are busy calling
for the barn door to be shut long after the horse has run off. Our task today is not to
"safeguard" or "protect" marriage but to rebuild it almost from scratch. The strategy for
doing so will necessarily be different from the strategy for defending it when it was merely
under threat.

2.

Let us now turn to our second point about women's traditional status: namely, that it
implied sexual complementarity and cooperation. This means that their status cannot be
maintained once complementarity is displaced by a normative ideal of sexual equivalence
and competition. The feminist movement has, of course, effected precisely such a
displacement, thereby undermining the respect for women they claim to promote. I will
now try to explain how that happened.

First, a caveat: most critical discussions of feminism concentrate on refuting its doctrines,
such as the ascription of feminine traits to upbringing rather than nature. My approach
will be different. While such formal refutation of doctrines is not valueless, it seems to me
to mistake the fundamental character of feminism. The feminist movement consists
essentially not of ideas at all but of attitudes, or even mere emotions. Feminist "theory," as
it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up
with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on
feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that
people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed
doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. But in the case of
feminism, even more than Marxism and other political ideologies, it is rather the beliefs
that are motivated by various personal and nonrational needs. I propose, therefore, that
feminism may be better understood through a consideration of the feminist herself.

A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the
male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than
nurturing and assisting. This in turn involves relative independence, action, and
competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for
communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and
deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of
pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional
impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes
have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of "primacy" rather than
superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One
sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent 
even, so far as I know, among homosexuals.

Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses
them. Healthy societies are marked by a cooperative reciprocity between the sexes, but an
unequal one in the sense that it involves male leadership of the female, somewhat as in
ballroom dancing.

The feminists' response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of
inadequacy in regard to men  a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her
"equality." She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than
partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of
envy.

And perhaps even more than she envies the male role itself, the feminist covets the
external rewards attached to its successful performance: social status, recognition, power,
wealth, and the chance to control wealth directly (rather than be supported). She tends not
to give much thought to the great mass of men who struggle to fulfill the demands of their
role without ever attaining the rewards of superior performance.

Let us consider next what envy is. First, it involves a painful awareness of something good
or desirable in another person. This much it has in common with emulation. The
emulator, however, is primarily concerned with self-improvement. Envy has a
fundamentally negative character; it wants to bring the other down rather than raise itself
up. The envier usually does not admit that explicitly but rather claims to have been
cheated, whether by the envied party or by the surrounding society: he disguises his envy
as a zeal for justice. Often he claims to want to compete on a level playing field, but
maintains that competition has been "fixed."

Envy, however, is distinct from the sense of justice in being fundamentally unappeasable.
The righteously indignant person genuinely wants to come to a settlement. By contrast, if
the envied party grants what the envier demands, it merely further demonstrates his
superiority and provokes more envy. One reason the feminists have gotten as far as they
have is that many men are untroubled by envy themselves. These men cannot understand
the psychology behind feminism. Sincerely caring about women and wishing to promote
their welfare, they waste effort on futile attempts to reason or compromise. They imagine
that limited concessions might persuade feminists that men are not really so bad after
all.

But it is a metaphysical impossibility to "grant" what a feminist envies: the successful performance of the male role including risk overcome, obstacles
surmounted, and objectively verifiable achievement. What the appeasers actually do is
grant women some of the external appearances and rewards of such achievement. That is
the meaning of corporate hiring and promotional preferences. But a little reflection will
reveal why such concessions can never satisfy the feminist. She is humiliated precisely by
the awareness that her advancement is an unearned act of charity on the part of the hated
"patriarchy." It would be difficult to imagine, in fact, a more efficient means of stoking her
frustration and resentment. (The situation with racial preferences, incidentally, is precisely
analogous: thus, one book on Black beneficiaries of "affirmative action" is aptly titled
The Rage of a Privileged Class.)

Indeed, concessions are perceived as signs of weakness, and whet the appetite for more
concessions, a cycle that could only end with the complete self-destruction of the envied
party. In other words, feminists' claim to be motivated by love of justice or fairness is
flapdoodle. Feminism is a species not of righteous indignation but of hatred.

In practice, since the feminist can never be the equal of men at the male role, she
concentrates her efforts upon sabotaging that role. In other words, because she cannot level
up, she contents herself as best she can with leveling down. So the practical consequence of
feminist political power is to make it impossible for men to "do their thing" (fulfill their role). For example,
women may not be able to have careers as glamorous and successful as they imagined, but
one accusation of "harassment" is all it takes to destroy the career of a man whose
accomplishments she could never equal. And there is no question that many women get a
sadistic pleasure from wielding such power. I myself once heard a woman boast of getting
three different men fired.

A whole legal industry has mushroomed within a single generation based upon newly
invented crimes and torts of which only men can be guilty and only women can be
victims. Obviously, the Western tradition of high regard for women is not going to
survive the spread of such behavior indefinitely. Women who wonder why men do not
seem to "respect" them any more might seek the answer in the mirror.

Envy of the male role has devastating consequences for women's performance of their
own proper role as well. Although it may be a secondary or supporting one in relation to
men, it is indispensable for the survival of the race: the woman bears, nurtures, and to a
great extent educates the rising generation. The feminist either refuses to fulfill her natural
role or at best does so resentfully, sullenly, and poorly. For that reason, feminism should
not be treated merely as a personal folly on the part of some misguided or spoiled women
 it is a mortal threat to any society in which it truly takes hold. Enemies of
heterosexual cooperation and procreation are enemies of the human race.